Medicine: Public-Health Statesman

In the 40 years since he left Harvard Medical School, Colorado-born Alan Gregg has practiced medicine for only one year (as a member of the Harvard Medical Unit attached to the British Army in World War I), and he has never taught medicine. Yet no man alive has had a wider or deeper influence on both the practice and teaching of medicine than Dr. Gregg, who spent 37 years with the Rockefeller Foundation, 20 of them as head of its division of medical sciences.

On his recommendations, the foundation pushed projects that raised the standards of medical education (and hence, indirectly, of medical practice and public health) in dozens of foreign countries. On his advice, the foundation backed studies that proved the value of sulfanilamide, first of the modern wonder drugs. Thanks to Dr. Gregg’s daring, it financed studies on sex, including the late Alfred C. Kinsey’s work. It brought to the fore the long-neglected element of human satisfactions in modern, assembly-line industry. Finally, and perhaps most important, Gregg and the foundation crusaded to have mental illness treated as a medical problem—a revolutionary idea only a quarter-century ago.

In his years with the foundation, Dr. Gregg refused all honorary degrees and awards lest acceptance embarrass him in dealing with donors. Last week Medical Statesman Gregg, 66 and now retired, accepted his first, well-earned award. In Atlantic City he received a special Albert Lasker Award of the American Public

Health Association—its value just upped from $2,500 to $5,000—as an “exemplar par excellence of the ‘wellbeing of mankind throughout the world,’ public-health statesman, influential medical educator, wise counselor and friend.”

Other Lasker awards ($2,000) went to:

¶ Pittsburgh’s Dr. Jonas E. Salk for developing the poliomyelitis vaccine.

¶ Manhattan’s Dr. William P. Shepard of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. as a “pioneering industrial-health physician.”

¶ Detroit’s Dr. V. Everett Kinsey and Baltimore’s Dr. Arnall Patz for finding that excess oxygen given to premature infants causes retrolental fibroplasia and blindness.

¶ Columbia University’s Dr. Karl Meyer and M.I.T.’s Dr. Francis O. Schmitt for studies of connective tissues, important in rheumatism (TIME, Nov. 5).